Laravel Backend Developer

Job Description

Mervice Inc is a small, fast-moving fintech company building secure, omnichannel payment and fundraising solutions for nonprofits and SMBs. We power donations and merchant transactions across kiosks, terminals, and web—backed by robust APIs, data pipelines, and a modern CRM. Join a team that ships, learns, and iterates quickly without red tape.

Why this role

• Own core Laravel APIs that move real money and support mission-driven customers.
• Solve performance and reliability challenges at scale (latency, throughput, resilience).
• Work across schema design, queues, caching, and observability—end to end.
• Ship production changes weekly, and a pragmatic testing culture.

What you’ll do

• Design, implement, and harden RESTful Laravel APIs for payments and fundraising (idempotent endpoints, safe retries, pagination, rate limiting, input validation).
• Model data and write migrations; evolve schemas with zero/blue-green downtime patterns.
• Optimize database performance (eager loading to fix N+1; proper indexing; read/write separation; query caching).
• Build and operate queue workers for high-volume tasks (transactions, webhooks, ETL), with retries, backoff, and dead-letter handling.
• Implement authentication/authorization (Laravel Sanctum/Passport), RBAC, and per-route policies.
• Design caching strategies (Redis) for hot paths; instrument cache hit/miss metrics.
• Add observability: structured logs, metrics, tracing (e.g., Laravel Telescope, OpenTelemetry), p95/p99 latency tracking, SLOs/alerts.
• Contribute to performance profiling and capacity planning (memory, DB connections, queue throughput).
• Write automated tests (unit, feature/integration) and maintain CI pipelines; enforce test gates on PRs.
• Document APIs (OpenAPI), runbooks, READMEs, and ADRs for key decisions.
• Participate in pair programming, and incident response rotations.
• Collaborate with Product, QA, Frontend, and Design to scope, refine, and deliver features.
• Secure the platform using OWASP best practices (input validation, output encoding, CSRF, SSRF protection), secrets management, and least-privilege access.
• Support production with careful rollouts, feature flags, and post-incident reviews.

Must-have qualifications

• Minimum education: Bachelor of Computer Science.
• Experience: Minimum 3 years of hands-on Laravel backend development.
• Strong PHP 8+ and modern Laravel (8/9/10/11) proficiency.
• SQL mastery with MySQL (schema design, transactions, indexing, query plans, functions, triggers, procedures).
• Source control proficiency: Git (branching strategies, PRs, code reviews).
• Production experience with REST APIs, queues/jobs, Redis, and Docker-based workflows.
• Solid understanding of security and performance (OWASP, rate limiting, caching, idempotency).
• Testing mindset: unit + feature/integration tests.
• Clear technical writing (README, API docs, runbooks) and cross-functional collaboration.